Direct foreign investment in China up more than 6%

AFP, BEIJING

A woman works in a shoe factory in Jinjiang in China’s Fujian Province yesterday.

Photo: AFP

Foreign direct investment (FDI) into China rose 6.37 percent year-on-year in the first eight months of this year, the government said yesterday, adding it was a sign of investor confidence in the world’s second-biggest economy.

Incoming FDI, which excludes financial sectors, reached US$79.77 billion for the January to August period, the commerce ministry said in a statement. For August alone the figure was US$8.38 billion, up 0.62 percent on last year.

That represented a substantial slowdown after rises of 24.13 percent in July and 20.12 percent in June.

However, that was mainly due to a high base figure a year ago commerce ministry spokesman Shen Danyang (沈丹楊) said.

“Such single month volatilities are insufficient to reflect changes in China’s overall FDI. There is no need to worry about [a reversal] in the trend,” he said at a press conference.

Investment maintained “quite fast growth” in the eight-month period, Shen said in a statement.

“FDI growth is expected to be higher than last year,” he told reporters, adding that improved momentum since February had proven foreign investors’ confidence in China’s competitiveness.

Incoming investment from the EU rose significantly, up 24.3 percent to US$5.44 billion, as it did from the US, up 18.0 percent to US$2.50 billion.

However, the vast majority of investment into China comes from a group of 10 Asian countries and regions including Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan, and FDI from them only rose 7.87 percent on-year to US$68.63 billion in the eight-month period.